Revolutionary socialism

Definition and scope

Revolutionary socialism denotes the current and tradition within socialism that holds a social revolution to be necessary for the transition from capitalism to socialism. The English-language encyclopedia explains that revolution here is not necessarily a violent insurrection but the seizure of political power by mass movements of the working class, so that the state is directly controlled or abolished by that class. The French encyclopedia defines it as a radical current of socialism that claims revolution as its path: it is often associated with Marxism and claimed by Leninism, Trotskyism, council communism and Luxemburgism, while Blanquism and anarchism, though not following Marx, also held that socialism must come through revolution. The current is opposed to reformist socialism, which seeks to correct capitalism's problems gradually by reforming existing institutions.

Revolutionary socialism is less the name of a party or school than one answer to the question "reform or revolution?". For that reason conspirators, leaders of risings, mutinous sailors and theorists from different periods and countries are grouped under it.

Babeuf and Blanqui: the tradition of conspiracy and insurrection

In 1796 Gracchus Babeuf and his comrades, the "Equals", plotted to overthrow the Directory in order to abolish private property and achieve "perfect equality" and "the common happiness". The plot was betrayed and Babeuf was sentenced to death, but Philippe Buonarroti's book of 1828, Conspiration pour l'Égalité, dite de Babeuf, gave it a lasting afterlife. Marx and Engels saw in the Conspiracy of the Equals "the first appearance of a truly active communist party".

Louis Auguste Blanqui carried the tradition into the nineteenth century. A Carbonaro from 1824, he was involved in the republican conspiracies of his time, and on 12 May 1839, with Armand Barbès and others, he led a rising in Paris that seized the Palais de Justice and briefly occupied the Hôtel de Ville. His repeated insurrectionary attempts kept him in prison for much of his life and earned him the nickname "l'Enfermé". Blanquism is summed up as the idea that an organised small group of revolutionaries should deliver the decisive "coup de main" that brings the people into revolution, after which the revolutionaries in power would establish the new socialist system; it called for a temporary centralised dictatorship. In 1873 Engels described Blanqui as above all a "man of action" who believed that a small, well-organised minority, striking at the right moment, could carry the mass of the people with it. In Italy Carlo Pisacane theorised what became the "propaganda of the deed", the vanguard action that sparks insurrection; he led the Sapri expedition of 1857 and died at Sanza.

Marx, Engels and after 1848

The Communist Manifesto of 1848 declared: "The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions." After the defeat of 1848–1849 the Communist League in London split in 1850, when August Willich and Karl Schapper wanted to keep concentrating on revolutions while Marx and Engels aimed at building an international workers' movement. Twenty-four years after the Manifesto, Marx and Engels allowed that in developed countries "labour may attain its goal by peaceful means". The English-language encyclopedia contrasts this with the Blanquist view, in which an active minority overthrows the ruling elite by force regardless of the readiness of society as a whole.

The Paris Commune and the Russian revolutionaries

In the Paris Commune of 1871 the Blanquists held key posts in the police (Raoul Rigault among others), justice and the army, and joined the Jacobin republicans in setting up a Committee of Public Safety. Prosper-Olivier Lissagaray, who took part in the Commune, gathered testimony from survivors in exile and in 1876 published Histoire de la Commune de 1871, which was banned in France and circulated clandestinely; Eleanor Marx translated it into English.

In Russia Sergei Nechayev wrote the Catechism of a Revolutionary in 1869 as the rules of the secret society Narodnaya Rasprava. Opening with "The revolutionary is a doomed man", it is said to contain ideas of Mikhail Bakunin and Pyotr Tkachev as well, though Bakunin rejected it after reading it. The revolution of 1905 brought a series of mutinies in the armed forces: on the Black Sea Fleet battleship Potemkin in June, a rising that began spontaneously over bad food was led by Afanasy Matyushenko, and Lieutenant Pyotr Schmidt, who joined the Sevastopol rising in November, was shot on 6 March 1906. In the Finnish Civil War of 1918 the social-democratic journalist Ali Aaltonen became the first commander-in-chief of the Red Guards.

Reform or revolution

At the end of the nineteenth century the question erupted in the German Social Democratic Party as the revisionism debate (from 1896). Eduard Bernstein argued that capitalism had proved resilient and adaptable, so that the party could only improve the workers' position through social reforms within the existing mode of production. In Social Reform or Revolution?, serialised in the Leipziger Volkszeitung in 1898–1899, Rosa Luxemburg replied that for social democracy "the struggle for social reform is the means, the social revolution the goal", and quoted Bernstein's words "The final goal, whatever it may be, is nothing to me; the movement is everything" as the summary of his theory. The party leadership under August Bebel, together with the party left including Luxemburg and the Marxist centre around Karl Kautsky, rejected revisionism as a departure from the programme of revolutionary abolition of class society. In August 1914, however, the party voted for war credits; its opponents founded the Independent Social Democratic Party in 1917 and then the Communist Party of Germany.

The twentieth century and neighbouring currents

The Communist International, founded after the October Revolution, also defined itself in terms of revolutionary socialism. The October Revolution itself was read by some as a Blanquist-style coup, while Trotskyists argued that the Bolsheviks took power only after winning mass support in the soviets. Many Trotskyist groups, beginning with those that founded the Fourth International in 1938, use the name today in opposition to reformism. How the revolutionary moment should arise — who should organise the revolt and how — has long been debated within the tradition; Luxemburg was known for her theory of revolutionary spontaneity, and critics argued that she overstated spontaneity and neglected party organisation. Blanqui's ideas and practice are treated under Blanquism, and the reform line after Bernstein under Reformism and Revisionism.